On War and its promoters.
History appears to repeat, and one would think that with the acuity and science of investigative journalism in all its forms, the world would have had revealed to its awestruck masses, that 'War is a Racket'. However this simple fact is occulted - go figure...

Monday, 3 July 2017

Suckered by the oil industry again (Grenfell Tower Fire = Muslim BBQ)

Observations
on the state of the game known as the 'human race' – deadly winners
and dead losers

Introduction
- the karma of austerity - abstract

The Grenfell Tower
blaze is a direct result of the system of austerity as the privileged
elites vacuum everything of monetary value for themselves.

The punters get the
plastic version of everything - plastic flammable cladding on their
homes!

The
Grenfell
inferno through the eyes of the UK
Telegraph contains a video by Fabio
Bebber on hand at the carnage. It's not pretty and one can
discern the screams for help from the victims trapped in the towering
inferno. The cladding and insulation were flammable made from oil!
Who supplies the feedstock for plastic stuff – the oil industry.

Key
points

1.
The oil industry has played a major role in the development of human
20th century civilisation and will through the 21st.

2.
The role of the oil industry collaborating with UK/US Empire
interests has waged war and influenced government actions –
criminally.

3.
Over the last 30 years, state corporations acquire energy
corporations, further entrenching the power of energy corporations in
global governance

4.
The involvement of money in politics has rendered the democracy
useless in signalling necessary legislative programs to benefit most
humans.

5.
Public interest regulation is less likely under the current regime,
as the large and moneyed interests tilt the playing field to advance
their profit taking.

6.
The Grenfell Towers Inferno is a direct consequence of the disregard
for human rights by Western Governments (in this case the UK
Government) – whose rationale for action in the world is claimed to 'advance human rights' – that is clearly a lie!

The
Oil industry a brief synopsis on power and influence

We've
been suckered by the oil industry for quite a while now.

Several
old families and corporations were the initiators of the business of
black gold the energy life blood of the twentieth century economy. It
is the bulk of the modern economy too, accounting for 80+% of power
generation when coal is added, 90% of transport and contributing a
major portion of the material stock inputs in general goods
manufacturing 'plastic universe' often single use with lasting
deleterious effects.

Black
gold was already in vogue with the coal barons, however they would
share the power to motivate governments with the interests of the oil
barons. In a sense they are parallel interests.

Energy
demand for the foreseeable will be sourced mainly from fossil fuels
which in 2010 accounted for 84% of global use. It is estimated we
will require a 56 % increase in supply by 2040. Fossil fuels are
anticipated to provide close to 80% of the total. Note renewables
share is only anticipated to increase from 5 – 7% in this chart
from International Energy Outlook 2012.

The outlook for renewables is
expanding in advance of forecasts, however the task to move from
fossil fuels is gigantic.

Note:
I'm not looking at climate change or greenhouse gases in this paper,
more business as usual and looking from birth of the oil fired
industrial revolution.

Oil
Barons Rule lasted quite a while + consider the lasting institutional
imprint on western thinking and action

In
his day John D Rockefeller was the richest, and most powerful
character on the world stage (notwithstanding the riches of the
Rothschild interests and whomever else we don't know of. It was
revealed that J.P.Morgan retained only 17% of his bank at the time of
his death, the remainder by the Rothschilds).

The
oil industry partly directed by the Rockefeller family along with a
few British and European principles came to importance in the late
1800s. John D Rockefeller and the oil interests could wield
governments they had power over to attack other governments hostile
to the oil corporation's interests.

USMC
Major General Smedley Butler's testimony and famous speech, War
is a Racket makes this fact plain. During his 34-year career as a
Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines,
China, in Central America and the Caribbean during the Banana Wars,
and France in World War I. Butler is well known for having later
become an outspoken critic of U.S. wars and their consequences, as
well as exposing the Business Plot, an alleged plan to overthrow the
U.S. Government. He recounts the enormous profits and 21,000
millionaires that existed from WW1;

I
spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during
that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for
Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a
racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and
especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped
make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to
collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central
American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify
Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in
1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American
sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the
American fruit companies in 1903. In
China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way
unmolested. Looking back on it,
I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to
operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three
continents.

Oil
interests were bound tightly to the national interests of the
governments concerned – initially UK and US, Dutch, and latterly
the Sovereign Wealth Funds of oil rich states, Russia, China, Brazil,
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, Iran, Brunei. This played out
powerfully, notably where the UK and the US authorities (Intelligence
and Security departments) usurped democratic Iran with a coup and and
imposed the Shah or absolute despot, here from the US CIA webpages to
confirm the fact of the emerging method of dealing
to foreign leaderships deemed hostile by the Western (Oil)
Empire:

British colonialism
faced its last stand in 1951 when the Iranian parliament nationalized
the sprawling Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) after London refused
to modify the firm's exploitative concession. "By a series of
insensate actions," the British replied with prideful
stubbornness, "the Iranian Government is causing a great
enterprise, the proper functioning of which is of immense benefit not
only to the United Kingdom and Iran but to the whole free world, to
grind to a stop. Unless this is promptly checked, the whole of the
free world will be much poorer and weaker, including the deluded
Iranian people themselves." Of that attitude, Dean Acheson, the
secretary of state at the time, later wrote: "Never had so few
lost so much so stupidly and so fast." But the two sides were
talking past each other. The Iranian prime minister, Mohammed
Mossadeq, was "a visionary, a utopian, [and] a millenarian"
who hated the British, writes Kinzer. "You do not know how
crafty they are," Mossadeq told an American envoy sent to broker
the impasse. "You do not know how evil they are. You do not know
how they sully everything they touch."

The
Truman administration resisted the efforts of some British
arch-colonialists to use gunboat diplomacy, but elections in the
United Kingdom and the United States in 1951 and 1952 tipped the
scales decisively toward intervention. After the loss of India,
Britain's new prime minster, Winston Churchill, was committed to
stopping his country's empire from unraveling further. Eisenhower and
his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were dedicated to rolling
back communism and defending democratic governments threatened by
Moscow's machinations. In Iran's case, with diplomacy having failed
and a military incursion infeasible (the Korean War was underway),
they decided to take care of "that madman Mossadeq" through
a covert action under the supervision of the secretary of state's
brother, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles. (Oddly,
considering the current scholarly consensus that Eisenhower was in
masterful control of his administration, Kinzer depicts him as
beguiled by a moralistic John Foster and a cynical Allen.) Directing
the operation was the CIA's charming and resourceful man in Tehran,
Kermit Roosevelt, an OSS veteran, Arabist, chief of Middle East
operations, and inheritor of some of his grandfather Theodore's love
of adventure.

Malcolm Byrne,
deputy director of the National Security Archive at George Washington
University, said he believed British diplomats were still working to
conceal MI6’s activities from more than half a century ago.

“Sixty
years after the coup we are still not able to get a full picture of
the role played by British and American intelligence,” he said. “It
appears the reason is that history and current politics are
intersecting and the British are still reluctant to have their role
acknowledged.”

BP
and Exon Mobil are the largest investor owned oil corporations the
following series of charts provide a snapshot, the first chart
shows the change in ownership from 1970 to 2007, Russia and Venezuela
feature large in gas and oil respectively.

The
interest in Venezuela is because she holds the largest proven oil
reserves in the world. There is in effect long term economic warfare
being waged from Washington and the UK on many nations particularly
Venezuela.

Black
gold deposits follow the money – Venezuela and the near East

The
Near East and Venezuela oil reserves are well worth fighting for,
from a US perspective. The ability of oil interests, in conjunction
with military industrial complex and finance interests, to sway
governments to attack foreign powers with criminal aggression denies
the Western Empire's proclaimed statements that they, “defend the
human right for people to retain democratic power over their domestic
governments.” The pressure piled up on the Venezuela and Iran
governments ought be seen in this light.

The
Right to self determination is a UN Charter obligation, designed and
agreed by the Western victors in the aftermath of World War Two. The
fact that the UN Security Council was also designed to undermine this
principle is an institutional fact. Extract from UN
Charter Preamble;

We the peoples of
the United Nations Determined

to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith
in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human
person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large
and small, and

to establish
conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations
arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be
maintained, and

to promote social
progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

UK/US
Empire versus International Law – and other hypocrisies – media
willing prostitutes for empire

The
UK/US Empire is constantly meddling in other nation's affairs. The
mainstream media provides support as the propaganda arm of the
establishment which is driven by both state and 'deep state'
ambition. My recent NZ
Press Council complaint illustrates this point in relation to the NZ
Press (news media) and Government parallel tactics which deny effective space to 'speak truth to power'.

In
refusing my complaint they confirm in real terms the narrow bubble of
allowed 'url references' (website) one is 'allowed' to share in reader comments
to provide support for one's asserted or attested facts. If there is
no competition for the truth the corruption of truth by special interests invariably grows- the whole of this paper is a testament to
this simple fact of reality.

The
New Zealand Press Council supported Stuff and their editor Patrick
Crewdson quite emphatically and without any regard to the merits of
the matters I raised. They arrived at two findings;

1.
Said that they lacked jurisdiction, and;

2.
Made a statement about merit, despite their finding of lack of
jurisdiction.

Then effectively dismissed my content and merits without dealing to them
in any way.

The
process is distorted and perverse.

I'm
quietly determined to proceed to open the lock on transparency into
government (and media/corporation) information, intelligence,
decisions and action – particularly where they launch war, in
coalition or singularly – it's usually criminal.

There
is no institutional way around the corrupting blockage so Catch 22!

It
is through this approach to the problem that we gain another
perspective of the implications and consequences of the US state view
of its Exceptionalism.

US
Exceptionalism is the dominant power and point of difference in the
world and largely determines the general trend and approach to global
power politics – it has overseen the launch of many a war. Extract
from February 2, 2016 False
Flags Are Just a Conspiracy Theor … Admitted Fact by
Washingtons Blog;

There
is a network of ownership distributed amongst a narrow oligarchy of
billionaires, technocrats and corporations heads and their minions.
These dispense largesse as they need to advance their private and
group interests in the US social and political economy.

The
UK/US led Western Empire ruthlessly pursue their interests - national
and corporation (the same interest), across the expanse of the planet
irrespective of boundary or opposition from the domestic
jurisdictional and legal government! And often despite the opposition
of the domestic population. There is often deep collusion between the
despotic government with the US (Empire) interests pursuing economic
development (mining, dam development, industrial farming) with poor
outcomes for local or affected populations.

Facts
about our democracies – they do not presently exist or have no
effect on legislation!

Do
we adjust our behaviour on the basis of scientific observations that
suggest we ought to?

Princeton
University study on US Congressional decision making examined the
centrality of money to politics – the notion of democracy is denied
categorically! The study is illuminating. It inspired
a video which is well worth the 6 minutes. The Princeton
University study says;

...analysis
indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing
business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S.
government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest
groups have little or no independent influence. and;

When the preferences
of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are
controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to
have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy.

...we were able to
compare the wins and losses to the amount of money spent on each race
thanks to the resources at the centre for Responsive Politics.

Here’s the
verdict. In 2012, the candidate who spent more money during the race
won a whopping 95% of the time in the 429 house races with decisive
conclusions, 406 races.

In the Senate, that
number is slightly lower. The candidate who spent more won only 80%
of the time in the 33 Senate elections this cycle.

Some of the
candidates who pulled out a win despite being outspent include Chris
Murphy in Connecticut, Deb Fischer in Nebraska, and Dean Heller in
Nevada.

Also interesting is
that this doesn’t even include outside independent spending, like
money from Super PACs.

The
corruption of money on politics - liberal democratic civilisation is
consumed in decadence

The
UK Guardian ran a piece 5 weeks earlier, 5 May 2017 by Branko
Milanovic on the implications of inequality on the functioning of
democracy, which returns to the theme of the Princeton
Study. Branko Milanovic is the visiting presidential professor at
the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of
“Global
Inequality: a new approach for the age of globalization.”

the
article states;

Finally, we need to
look at the relationship between inequality and politics. In every
political system, even a democracy, the rich tend to hold more
political power. The danger is that this political power will be used
to promote policies that further cement the economic power of the
rich. The higher the inequality, the more likely we are to move away
from democracy toward plutocracy.

Or oligarchy as
suggested by the Princeton Study. What are the implications of the
elites determining most of the rules and legislative program in the
social and political economy?

US
politics (UK/US Empire) is the epitome of money power which
aggressively spreads its influence and interests around the planet by
whatever means at its disposal. International
law is meaningless in the context of US
exceptionalism.
In his introduction to the book, American
Exceptionalism and Human Rights, Michael Ignatieff identifies
three main types of exceptionalism: exemptionalism (supporting
treaties as long as Americans are exempt from them); double standards
(criticizing "others for not heeding the findings of
international human rights bodies, but ignoring what these bodies say
of the United States); and legal isolationism (the tendency of
American judges to ignore other jurisdictions). The contributors use
Ignatieff's essay as a jumping-off point to discuss specific types of
exceptionalism--America's approach to capital punishment and to free
speech, for example--or to explore the social, cultural, and
institutional roots of exceptionalism.

The
historic source of austerity – who determines who loses?

However,
to apportion blame to its rightful place, the contemporary system is
a product of the British led Central Banking system, established and
largely run for the advantage
of a select group of wealthy families in the UK, Europe and now
US:

Also
Rule
by Secrecy by Jim Marr makes fascinating reading about the rich
families driving the US social and political economy from page 55 of
the pdf under the heading “Rockefellers”;

To say that David
Rockefeller may be one of the most important men in America would be
an understatement. According to Gary Allen, in the year 1973 alone,
"David Rockefeller met with 27 heads of state, including the
rulers of Russia and Red China." In 1976 when Australian
president Malcolm Fraser visited the United States, he conferred with
David Rockefeller before meeting President Gerald Ford. "This is
truly incredible," wrote author Ralph Epperson, "because
David Rockefeller has neither been elected or appointed to any
governmental position where he could officially represent the United
States government."

Ferdinand
Lundberg's, The Rich and the Super Rich is study from 1968 into
the cross ownership and network of control of global wealth by 60 or
so families. It is testimony to the historical and continuous fact of
“an oligarchy at the centre of power in the US” from page 3,
Chapter One, “The Elect and the Damned” indicates that 50 years
on we suffer the same indignities;

….Most
Americans--citizens of the wealthiest, most powerful and most
ideal-swathed country in the world--by a very wide margin own nothing
more than their household goods, a few glittering gadgets such as
automobiles and television sets (usually purchased on the installment
plan, many at second hand) and the clothes on their backs. A horde if
not a majority of Americans live in shacks, cabins, hovels, shanties,
handme-down Victorian eyesores, rickety tenements and flaky apartment
buildings--as the newspapers from time to time chortle that new
Russian apartment-house construction is falling apart. (Conditions
abroad, in the standard American view, are everywhere far worse than
anywhere in the United States. The French, for example, could learn
much about cooking from the Automat and Howard Johnson.)

At the same time, a
relative handful of Americans are extravagantly endowed, like princes
in the Arabian Nights tales. Their agents deafen a baffled world with
a never ceasing chant about the occult merits of private-property
ownership (good for everything that ails man and thoroughly familiar
to the rest of the world, not invented in the United States), and the
vaulting puissance of the American owners.

It would be
difficult in the 1960's for a large majority of Americans to show
fewer significant possessions if the country had long labored under a
grasping dictatorship. How has this process been contrived of
stripping threadbare most of the populace, which once at least owned
small patches of virgin land? To this fascinating if off-color
question we shall give some attention later.

Interestingly,
complex systems are very hard to map into mathematical equations, so
the usual physics approach doesn't really work here. So what do we
know about complex systems? Well, it turns out that what looks like
complex behavior from the outside is actually the result of a few
simple rules of interaction. This means you can forget about the
equations and just start to understand the system by looking at the
interactions, so you can actually forget about the equations and you
just start to look at the interactions. And it gets even better,
because most complex systems have this amazing property called
emergence. So this means that the system as a whole suddenly starts
to show a behavior which cannot be understood or predicted by looking
at the components of the system. So the whole is literally more than
the sum of its parts. And all of this also means that you can forget
about the individual parts of the system, how complex they are. So if
it's a cell or a termite or a bird, you just focus on the rules of
interaction.

As a result,
networks are ideal representations of complex systems. The nodes in
the network are the system's components, and the links are given by
the interactions. So what equations are for physics, complex networks
are for the study of complex systems.

This approach has
been very successfully applied to many complex systems in physics,
biology, computer science, the social sciences, but what about
economics? Where are economic networks? This is a surprising and
prominent gap in the literature. The study we published last year,
called "The Network of Global Corporate Control," was the
first extensive analysis of economic networks.

….Well,
it turns out that the 737 top shareholders have the potential to
collectively control 80 percent of the TNCs' value. Now remember, we
started out with 600,000 nodes, so these 737 top players make up a
bit more than 0.1 percent. They're
mostly financial institutions in the US and the UK. And it gets even
more extreme. There are 146 top players in the core, and they
together have the potential to collectively control 40 percent of the
TNCs' value.

What should you take
home from all of this? Well, the high degree of control you saw is
very extreme by any standard. The high degree of interconnectivity of
the top players in the core could pose a significant systemic risk to
the global economy. And we could easily reproduce the TNC network
with a few simple rules. This means that its structure is probably
the result of self-organization. It's an emergent property which
depends on the rules of interaction in the system, so it's probably
not the result of a top-down approach like a global conspiracy.

Our study "is
an impression of the moon's surface. It's not a street map." So
you should take the exact numbers in our study with a grain of salt,
yet it "gave us a tantalizing glimpse of a brave new world of
finance."

Now
I'm rich what do I do with it?

What do super rich
elites do? What does a billionaire value? Their values are reflected
in the present legislative environment given they have the most money
to dispense for the pursuit of their interests. The foregoing
illustrates that the oligarchy both as individuals and in association
within the “network of control” exert most influence over
political decision making.

Do
the super rich work for the social good? Pay tax – no way!

Is it even their role
might be a reasonable side question?

If not how is the
social good advanced? Who's job is it to ensure the social good?

The Panama Papers
identified a small portion of the rich and lengths they go to hide
assets to evade taxation. The Panama papers highlight the lengths
that governments go to support their tax evasion schemes. New
Zealand's ex bankster Prime Minister John Key said there was no
problem with NZ foreign trusts identified in the Panama Papers! The
conspiracy is extensive, it is global.

“... we exploited
a massive trove of data leaked from HSBC Switzerland, the so-called
HSBC files, to fill this gap. In 2007 a systems engineer, Hervé
Falciani, extracted the internal records of HSBC Private Bank, the
Swiss subsidiary of HSBC. In 2008, Falciani turned the data over to
the French government, who shared it with foreign tax
administrations. The documents leaked by Falciani included the
complete internal records of more than 30,000 clients of this Swiss
bank in 2006-07.”

At
the time of the leak, HSBC Switzerland was a major actor in the
offshore wealth management industry. It managed US$118.4bn – about
4% of all the foreign wealth managed by Swiss banks. This is a unique
source of information through which to study tax evasion, because the
leak can be seen as a random event, and it comes from a large (and,
the available evidence suggests, representative) offshore bank;

The higher one moves
up the wealth distribution, the higher the probability of hiding
assets. Scandinavian households in the top 0.01% of the wealth
pyramid – the ultra-rich, who own more than $40m in net wealth each
– are 250 times more likely than average to hide assets.
Furthermore, the ultra-rich HSBC customers had considerably more
wealth in their accounts than other customers – so although they
were very few in number, they owned around half of all the wealth
hidden at HSBC.

This pattern is not
specific to HSBC or the Panama Papers. Over the last few years,
thousands of Norwegians and Swedes have voluntarily declared
previously hidden assets under a tax amnesty. Here again, the
super-rich are found to own half of the total amount of offshore
wealth.

So what are the
consequences for inequality? At the very top of the pyramid, it is
much greater than previously estimated. In Norway, where the
available wealth data is particularly detailed, the super-wealthy
appear to be 30% wealthier than previously thought, when all the
wealth hidden in tax havens is taken into account. The share of
wealth owned by the top 0.1% increases from 8% to 10%.

Since Scandinavians
generally pay their taxes and hide little wealth in total, our
results are likely to be even stronger in Great Britain and
elsewhere. A more accurate measurement of tax evasion would likely
increase inequality levels even more than in Scandinavia.

These results
underscore a basic truth: in a world where wealth is globalised and
where a big industry has specialised in helping the ultra-rich avoid
and sometimes evade their taxes, our ability to track great fortunes
– and to tax them appropriately – faces considerable challenges.

With ever diminishing
budgets combined with powerful lobbies pushing self interest, the
public interest runs a distant last place when governments legislate
and regulate the social and political economy.

Grenfell
Tower block fire was an incident waiting to happen. The austerity
program run by consecutive UK governments has entrenched poverty for
the underclasses in Britain. It is one of the most unequal societies
on the planet with its pretensions of aristocracy and privilege.

GrenfellAction Group, a grass-roots community group, has repeatedly raised
concerns including fire safety concerns about the management of
high-rise apartments and the shoddy and unsafe nature of them. In a
blog raising social issues in the area, they criticised Kensington
and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) for alleged
failings spanning years. Grenfell Action Group make the following statement;

The
Grenfell Action Group predict that it won’t be long before the
words of this blog come back to haunt the KCTMO management and we
will do everything in our power to ensure that those in authority
know how long and how appallingly our landlord has ignored their
responsibility to ensure the heath and safety of their tenants and
leaseholders. They can’t say that they haven’t been warned! And;

It is a truly
terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that
only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence
of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring an end to the dangerous living
conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they
inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders. We believe that the
KCTMO are an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no business to
be charged with the responsibility of looking after the every day
management of large scale social housing estates and that their
sordid collusion with the RBKC Council is a recipe for a future major
disaster.

Unfortunately, the
Grenfell Action Group have reached the conclusion that only an
incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO residents will
allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the
practices that characterise the malign governance of this
non-functioning organisation.

Grenfell
Action Group reports on the aftermath for others housing adjacent
Grenfell Tower, in the same projects. The ceilings and other surfaces
of the Grenfell pyre were apparently coated in asbestos, which flaked
off in the fury, and is now littered over the neighbourhood. Asbestos
dust and other toxins from combustion of toxic plastics are being
respired by residents of the housing project. Austerity includes
getting a lungful of further insult to their terrible distress.

Apparently
no one is doing monitoring of the air nor the nearby populations.
Looking to the future for Grenfell project residents and nearby folk.

For
comparison 9/11 responders and folk who were in the city in that
aftermath are now suffering diseases likely contracted through
overdoses of ground zero atmospheric and workplace toxins and dust
pollution.

Shabby
again - austerity is the mode of delivery of all State Services to
the UK citizen and resident even when the state is largely the
culpable authority in respect to any duty to care to those in it's
realm! They are exposed for the criminals they are!

Notwithstanding,
what any might claim, the authorities ought have a fair idea how many
charred remains of the deceased residents and visitors that night
they have since discovered. Eighty (80) is the number that I've heard most
recently.

The
Regulatory Bodies - those who are paid to prevent fire and protect
the public

“The
Government has not done the retest properly,” the Tory peer said.

“They
are not testing the whole system. We should be testing the
insulation. There is more than a good chance that the insulation is
probably the main problem.”

June
23 update from Celotex the
manufacturer of the RS5000 rainscreen cladding system used on the
towering inferno.

Grenfell
Tower: Celotex is to stop the supply of RS5000 for use in rainscreen
cladding systems in buildings over 18m tall

Celotex
is shocked by the tragic events of the Grenfell Tower fire. Our
thoughts are with everyone affected by this devastating human
tragedy. We have been supplying building products for over forty
years and as a business our focus has always been to supply safe
insulation products to make better buildings.

We
want to do everything that we can to support the Government’s
ongoing response to the tragedy. We continue to offer our full
cooperation with the investigations.

Celotex
notes the comments made by Scotland Yard at this morning’s briefing
in respect of the insulation used in Grenfell Tower. In view of the
focus on rainscreen cladding systems and the insulation forming part
of them, Celotex believes that the right thing to do is to stop the
supply of Celotex RS5000 for rainscreen cladding systems in buildings
over 18m tall with immediate effect (including in respect of ongoing
projects), pending further clarity.

Who
was Grenfell? A soldier and knight for the UK Empire! More from
gazing into the pyre

Grenfell
Tower and adjacent Grenfell Road were named to commemorate a notable
who served valiantly King and Country as a soldier, terrorising
British enemies and furthering her ambitions and national interests
in the period to World War 1.

Field Marshal
Francis Wallace Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, GCB, GCMG, PC (29 April
1841 – 27 January 1925) was a British Army officer. After serving
as aide-de-camp to the Commander-in-Chief, South Africa, he fought in
the 9th Xhosa War, the Anglo-Zulu War and then the Anglo-Egyptian
War. He went on to become Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian
Army and commanded the forces at the Battle of Suakin in December
1888 and at the Battle of Toski in August 1889 during the Mahdist
War. After that he became Governor of Malta and then
Commander-in-Chief, Ireland before retiring in 1908.

Baron
Grenfell purchased his commission into the army where he dutifully
dealt to the foreigners on behalf of the British aristocracy and
Empire. His name now forever memorialised in the towering inferno
that claimed so many lives who hail from the regions of past British
Colonial Possessions (as were the possessed people – 'for their own
good') where the honourable Field Marshall Grenfell applied his
soldiering art. The poetics of karma and fate.

We much regret to
record the death of Lord Grenfell, the Senior Field-Marshal of the
Army, who died on Tuesday. Lord Grenfell will be chiefly remembered,
of course, for his active part in the pacification of Egypt, and the
defeat of the Mahdi. Perhaps the most picturesque incident in his
career was when he was sent out to supersede Lord Kitchener in the
task of the re-conquest of the Sudan. He, seeing that all was going
well, refused to exercise his seniority and allowed Kitchener to
complete his task at the battles of Omdurman and Atbara, and thus
receive the credit which he deserved.

The
Mahdist War (Arabic: الثورة
المهدية‎‎ ath-Thawra
al-Mahdī; 1881–99) was a British colonial war of the late 19th
century, which was fought between the Mahdist Sudanese of the
religious leader Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, who had proclaimed
himself the "Mahdi" of Islam (the "Guided One"),
and the forces of the Khedivate of Egypt, initially, and later the
forces of Britain. Eighteen years of war resulted in the joint-rule
state of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956), a condominium of the
British Empire and the Kingdom of Egypt.

The British
participation in the war is called the Sudan Campaign, which is
vividly described in The River War: An Historical Account of the
Reconquest of the Soudan (1899) by Winston Churchill, a participant
in the war; other names for this war are the "Mahdist Revolt",
the "Anglo–Sudan War" and the "Sudanese Mahdist
Revolt".

Over
a century later - the post 9/11 war on terror destroys the same territories and Mahdi
(Muslim) enemy – and they say history doesn't
repeat?

Empire's
modern war machine, its warriors and their technological awesomeness

The
absurdity of the post 9/11 wars is again brought to public notice
through the movies.

One of the movie’s
best scenes takes place in a conference hall in Germany, where Pitt
is trying to drum up support for more allied troops to fight in
Afghanistan. He comes armed with a whiteboard, and he deploys a
bewildering flow chart about the dynamics of insurgency and
counterinsurgency, but Tilda Swinton, playing a German member of
parliament, blows it all to hell. She points out that the reason for
invading Afghanistan was to crush Al Qaeda, which was based there
with Osama bin Laden, and was pretty much chased out of the country
in the first months of the invasion. After so many years of stalemate
against the Taliban, what is the purpose of continuing to fight?

“As
an elected representative of the people of Germany, it is my job to
ensure that the personal ambitions of those who serve those people
are kept in check,” Swinton says. “You have devoted your entire
life, general, to the fighting of war, and this situation in
Afghanistan for you is the culmination of all your years of training,
all your years of ambition. This is the great moment of your life. It
is understandable to me that you should have therefor a fetish for
completion, to make your moment glorious. It is my job, however, to
ensure that your personal ambitions are not entirely delusional and
do not carry with them an unacceptable cost for everybody else.”

Peter
Maass the reviewer goes on to report;

I met the kinds of
officers and diplomats depicted so scathingly in “War Machine,”
and while exaggerated in the movie, they are real. They probably mean
well but they fail or refuse to see what everyone around them can
see, and must pay for in blood. Our delusional leaders finally have
the movie their insanity deserves.

The first reason has
to do with the profits of the military/security complex.

The
military/security complex is a combination of powerful private and
governmental interests that need a threat to justify an annual budget
that exceeds the GDP of many countries. War gives this combination of
private and governmental interests a justification for its massive
budget, a budget whose burden falls on American taxpayers whose real
median family income has not risen for a couple of decades while
their debt burden to support their living standard has risen.

The second reason
has to do with the Neoconservative ideology of American world
hegemony. According to the Neoconservatives, who most certainly are
not conservative of any description, the collapse of communism and
socialism means that History has chosen “Democratic Capitalism,”
which is neither democratic nor capitalist, as the World’s
Socio-Economic-Political system and it is Washington’s
responsibility to impose Americanism on the entire world. Countries
such as Russia, China, Syria, and Iran, who reject American hegemony
must be destabilized and desroyed as they stand in the way of
American unilateralism.

The Third reason has
to do with Israel’s need for the water resources of Southern
Lebanon. Twice Israel has sent the vaunted Israeli Army to occupy
Southern Lebanon, and twice the vaunted Israeli Army was driven out
by Hezbollah, a militia supported by Syria and Iran.

To be frank, Israel
is using America to eliminate the Syrian and Iranian governments that
provide military and economic support to Hezbollah. If Hezbollah’s
suppliers can be eliminated by the Americans, Israel’s army can
steal Southern Lebanon, just as it has stolen Palestine and parts of
Syria.

The
Muslim BBQ at Grenfell Tower just keeps on giving for the elites

A
striking coincidence 14 June is the 71st
birthday of the leader of the free world - Donald Trump.

Hell
yes it doesn't get better than Muslims cooked in the Grenfell Tower
Birthday pyre for the misogynist and racist Donald Trump.

I
wonder what interesting off the cuff comments Trump made on first
hearing of the Grenfell funeral pyre?

Imagine
at least one cooked Muslim for every year of the Orange Baboon's
existence as a man on the planet. What a birthday treat!

Since
his inauguration the US military have killed hundreds in Yemen,
Syria, Iraq, Sudan and wherever else. Many of these are
non-combatants - civilians like you and I. Collateral damage in the
eternal war.

Trump's
promises
and reality in his first 100 days of office were not the
greatest. There was a bit of a settling in period where the US
Administration and power players had to learn to do government Trump
style. Notwithstanding all that, Trump has been the butt of the
liberal establishment jokes at every point - except when it comes to
waging war!

Trump's
war making efforts will be hard pressed to match the genocidal record
by Bush Jnr. and Obama, and the willing coalition of genocidal
aggressive murders. Estimates range, however one suggestion is that 4
million Muslims have been sacrificed to the Western Empire's
cannibalistic desire for blood and war. Trump might be the man to
step it up a bit, he likes things to “Make America Great Again.”

What's
the greatest bang for bucks in war – Nuclear bombs big and
especially small!

The
smaller the better apparently.

To
date the US and its allies, are the only nation to employ Nuclear
Weapons in anger.

Israeli
/ Saudi Arabia Tactical Nuclear Strike on Yemen2 stage dual warhead !
Bunker Buster Weapon ! A nuclear bunker buster, also known as an Deep
Earth-Penetrating Weapon (EPW) First blast is the first stage
blasting the surface layer and second blast (a few second later is
the Main Charge detonating deep under the ground. This is not the Big
ass Nukes of yesteryear:

“The
combination of the cameras plastic lens and the photoelectric effect
produced in the cameras CCD pick up chip (because it is basically a
very large array of photo diodes) allows them to act as very good
detectors of high level ionizing radiation. Low level radiation in
this case is not of concern because it will not immediately kill you
or have long term negative health effects.

By simply pointing
the camera at an explosive event it will immediately determine if it
is nuclear or not. When the camera’s CCD pick up chip is overloaded
by excess radiation it will pixelize showing white sparkles all over
the picture of the fireball or blast image area.”

Smith supplied a
frame-by-frame analysis of the explosion, citing not only radiation,
but a telltale nuclear flash whose duration and nature allowed rough
approximation of the type of weapon used and the size of the fuel or
“pit” that made up the core of the device.

US
to spend $1trillion upgrading nuclear arsenal – who benefits?

Austerity
for the military industrial complex – no way - austerity is for the
powerless

The
US during the Obama presidency announced a nuclear
bomb upgrade over thirty (30) years to the value of $1trillion
dollars. Obama announced that some of the money would be spent on
constructing nuclear bombs with lower yields so small nuclear bombs.
Small nuclear bombs that are more likely to be deployed in battle
from the man they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to – the irony is gut
wrenching!

That
will be money spent at nuclear corporations on making awesome mass
destruction weapons that are technically, militarily, and
politically more likely to be used in anger against civil targets or
with civil collateral damage. Nuclear weapons are technically
illegal, although there is no power with sufficient force to enforce
a ban.

The
people of Aotearoa New Zealand led the global effort to request the
International Court of Justice (ICJ) (the World Court) to give an
advisory opinion on the illegality of nuclear weapons. The initiative
was the idea of Christchurch's Harold Evans a retired District Court
Judge inspired in 1986 by US based international law professor
Richard Falk. Ultimately the World Court delivered its advisory
position 8 July 1996 – the opinion declared that the threat and use
of nuclear weapons as generally illegal and that states had an
obligation to conclude negotiations to eliminate them. There was one
qualification: the court could not determine the legality of the use
of nuclear weapons by a state in the extreme circumstance of self
defence, when its survival is at stake.1

The
initial request for an advisory opinion by the ICJ was presented by
the World Health Organization (WHO) on 3 September 1993, but the ICJ
did not render an opinion on this request because the WHO was ultra
vires, or acting outside its legal capacity.

On
15 December 1994 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution
A/RES/49/75K and accepted by the Court in January 1995. This asked
the ICJ urgently to render its advisory opinion on the following
question:

Is
the threat or use of nuclear weapons in any circumstances permitted
under international law?

The court replied
that "There is in neither customary nor conventional
international law any specific authorization of the threat or use of
nuclear weapons";

The court replied
that "There is in neither customary nor conventional
international law any comprehensive and universal prohibition of the
threat or use of nuclear weapons as such";

The court replied
that "A threat or use of force by means of nuclear weapons that
is contrary to Article 2, paragraph 4, of the United Nations Charter
and that fails to meet all the requirements of Article 51, is
unlawful";

The court replied
that "A threat or use of nuclear weapons should also be
compatible with the requirements of the international law applicable
in armed conflict, particularly those of the principles and rules of
humanitarian law, as well as with specific obligations under
treaties and other undertakings which expressly deal with nuclear
weapons"

The court replied
that "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be
contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed
conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian
law; However, in view of the current state of international law, and
of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude
definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be
lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in
which the very survival of a State would be at stake"

The court replied
that "There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and
bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in
all its aspects under strict and effective international control".

That was 1996 and now
21 years later the world displays a remarkable lack of maturity in dealing with the nuclear threat and most other existential threats to
mass survival for the long term.

The latest noises from
the US White House indicate a willingness to ramp up the pressure in
an already tense world.

One can see clearly the
US pivot to Asia strategy is about the curtailment of the rise of
China. US paranoia about competitors (and the need for a foreign
enemy real or imagined) has largely determined global defence and
military posture since WW2.

The next map indicates
so called risks to the development of oil and gas deposits to feed
the energy needs of a 10 billion person planet.

Conclusions,
implications and action to redeem the human race

Nafeez
Ahmed is a British author and investigative journalist. Ahmed's
academic work has focused on the systemic causes of mass violence. He
has taught at the Department of International Relations, University
of Sussex, and has lectured at Brunel University’s Politics &
History Unit at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, for
courses in international relations theory, contemporary history,
empire and globalization. He is a former environment blogger for The
Guardian, writing regularly for their Earth
Insight website from March 2013 to July 2014.

New scientific
models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show
that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades
industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic
food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water
scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability.

Before you panic,
the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe
it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that
people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and
policies.

By successfully
modelling the “impact of climate-induced drought on crop failures
and the ensuing impact on food prices,” he said, the model can then
be recalibrated to “experiment with different scenarios.”

“We
ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual
trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without
any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend. The
results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total
failure to change course, the global food supply system would face
catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots. In
this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food
production falls permanently short of consumption.”

Another steering
committee member raised their hand: “So is this going to happen? Is
this a forecast?”

“No,”
said Jones. “This scenario is based on simply running the model
forward. The model is a short-term model. It’s not designed to run
this long, as in the real world, trends are always likely to change,
whether for better or worse.”

“Okay,
but what you’re saying is that if there is no change in current
trends, then this is the outcome?” continued the questioner.

Jones nodded with a
half-smile. “Yes,” he said quietly.

For the first time,
then, we know that in private, British and US government agencies are
taking seriously long-standing scientific data showing that a
business-as-usual trajectory will likely lead to civilisational
collapse within a few decades — generating multiple near-term
global disruptions along the way.

The question that
remains is: what we are going to do about it?

Last
words from Grenfell Action Group who quote 'The Radical Housing
Network' on the UK Government announced Grenfell Tower fire inquiry;

“The
appointment of Sir Martin Moore-Bick as the judge in the Grenfell
inquiry is deeply distressing. Sir Moore-Bick has a track record
of facilitating the social cleansing of London, approving Westminster
Council’s decision to house a single mother with five children in
Milton Keynes, 50 miles away from her family and networks, a decision
later overturned by the Supreme Court. The government are clearly
preparing a stitch-up, trying to put a judge at the heart of the
establishment in charge of the inquiry, who supports the inhumane
housing policies which have led to Grenfell.

How
can we have faith in this panel to deliver the protection we need?
These appointments are yet further evidence that the establishment is
not committed to providing justice for Grenfell residents, and are
unwilling to put in place measures which will prevent a tragedy of
this enormity from happening again.”

Pilgrim
Tucker, who worked for a while with the Grenfell Action Group and is
continuing to support local residents, added:

“Residents
from Lancaster West Estate asked Theresa May to involve them in the
decision making on the Grenfell Inquiry. In appointing Sir Martin
Moore-Bick, she has ignored them, and appointed a completely
inappropriate judge. We have no faith that this inquiry will produce
justice.”

Catch
22 blockage to transparency is 'the national interest and privileged
information' shared between governments and corporations: but not the
public – this must change!

Governments
hide information from their constituencies – my paper and many
others I've developed over the past few years prove this thesis.

The
problem of secrecy and its effect on governance and decision making
is key to resolving the human challenge in the twenty-first (21st
) century. My
next posts will address what I propose and do in this regard.

Meanwhile in NZ the bureaucrats play merry hell with people's lives, oil filled aluminium composite panels which fail fire tests are still being installed - note the NZ Government is involved through it's Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), extract from article;

The expert fire engineer hired by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment to audit the certification system, recommended the suspension of six certificates covering 13 types of the aluminium composite panel cladding.

Melbourne expatriate engineer Tony Enright pointed out in his confidential report that a key test in Britain in response to Grenfell had failed these panels.

That was more than four months ago, and the Ministry has not used the Building Act's suspension powers.

Instead, it is saying the audit did not stack up. It has used Dr Enright widely in the past.

"MBIE has since commissioned an independent fire engineer to peer review Enright Consulting's audit and all 13 ACP products in the audit," the ministry said in a statement last night.

"This peer review is vital as MBIE is also mindful that a ... suspension for every [aluminium composite panel] product in New Zealand would have considerable practical and commercial consequences for suppliers and the certifying body."

What about the consequences for those who might be trapped in another towering inferno? No mention in the article of MBIE's consideration of the potential risk and implications for those that rely on Central Government product assurance. Who's liable if and when there's another unfortunate accident? Well one thing is for sure in a causal universe the government knows that petrol cladding is a high fire risk.